Sunday, March 07, 2010

Writing for the New York Times, Laurie Goodstein carries the words of defectors from the "Church" of Scientology, who claim it hides abuse. A few paragraphs of the article appear below, followed by one of many entries in the comments section that express sentiments similar to those we have heard expressed 'round the dinner table - "Transparent, laughable, awful, cultish trash, the whole deal, top to bottom. Don't reform it. Junk it. And rescue the deluded." Indeed. Pappillon was never intended to focus exclusively on cycling, doping, corruption in sport, etc. every day - we'll be back with regularly-scheduled programming shortly. Until then, read on...

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years — in keeping with the church’s belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

But after 13 years and growing disillusionment, the Collbrans decided to leave the Sea Org, setting off on a Kafkaesque journey that they said required them to sign false confessions about their personal lives and their work, pay the church thousands of dollars it said they owed for courses and counseling, and accept the consequences as their parents, siblings and friends who are church members cut off all communication with them.

“Why did we work so hard for this organization,” Ms. Collbran said, “and why did it feel so wrong in the end? We just didn’t understand.”

They soon discovered others who felt the same. Searching for Web sites about Scientology that are not sponsored by the church (an activity prohibited when they were in the Sea Org), they discovered that hundreds of other Scientologists were also defecting — including high-ranking executives who had served for decades.

Fifty-six years after its founding by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, the church is fighting off calls by former members for a Reformation. The defectors say Sea Org members were repeatedly beaten by the church’s chairman, David Miscavige, often during planning meetings; pressured to have abortions; forced to work without sleep on little pay; and held incommunicado if they wanted to leave. The church says the defectors are lying..." Read the rest of the story here.

Selected Comment from NY Times:A reformation! Give me a break! Scientology is one of the most absurdly delusional religions going. Really, most religions are based on obvious myths of one sort or another, but Scientology's myths are WHACKED.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Xenu, one of the key characters in this sci-fi

The story of Xenu is covered in OT III, part of Scientology’s secret “Advanced Technology” doctrines taught only to advanced members who have undergone many expensive hours of auditing and reached the state of Clear. It is described in more detail in the accompanying confidential “Assists” lecture of October 3, 1968 and is dramatized in Revolt in the Stars (a screenplay written by L. Ron Hubbard in 1977).

Hubbard wrote that seventy-five million years ago, Xenu was the ruler of a Galactic Confederacy which consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets including Earth, which was then known as “Teegeeack”.The planets were overpopulated, with an average population of 178 billion. The Galactic Confederacy’s civilization was comparable to our own, with aliens “walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute” and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those “circa 1950, 1960″ on Earth.

Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of his citizens together under the pretense of income tax inspections, then paralyzed them and froze them in a mixture of alcohol and glycol to capture their souls. The kidnapped populace was loaded into spacecraft for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The appearance of these spacecraft would later be subconsciously expressed in the design of the Douglas DC-8, the only difference being: “the DC8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn’t.” When they had reached Teegeeack/Earth, the paralyzed citizens were unloaded around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were then lowered into the volcanoes and detonated simultaneously. Only a few aliens’ physical bodies survived. Hubbard described the scene in his film script, Revolt in the Stars:

"Simultaneously, the planted charges erupted. Atomic blasts ballooned from the craters of Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Washington, Fujiyama, Etna, and many, many others. Arching higher and higher, up and outwards, towering clouds mushroomed, shot through with flashes of flame, waste and fission. Great winds raced tumultuously across the face of Earth, spreading tales of destruction…"–L. Ron Hubbard, "Revolt in the Stars"

Click here for another three-hundred-plus comments on the subject. Or, visit the Operation Clambake website, which, since 1996, has been engaged in an effort to "undress" the Church of Scientology (according to Wikipedia, Operation Clambake, also referred to by its Web address, Xenu.net, is a Web site and Norway-based non-profit organization, launched in 1996, that publishes mostly critical information about the Church of Scientology).Anyway,of particular interest is the section dealing with Scientology's use of copyright law to shield from public scrutiny information that might otherwise be damaging to the organization's standing and could more definitively reveal the suggested cult-like aspects of its operation.

"...By using copyright laws the Church of Scientology withholds information about the teachings of its founder from the public. The public sees only a limited amount of information, information the "Church" feels will not harm its reputation to any great degree. Thus people are attracted into it based on this limited information and its seemingly fascinating possibilities. Once in, the existing members of that organisation have the opportunity to possibly erode the critical thinking faculties of the new member over a period of years. After that, the person has either left, been evicted or possibly their critical thinking faculties have been eroded to the degree where the absurd is accepted as spiritual truth..."

Sounds kinda like the Republican Party in 2012 with Sarah Palin as the intellectual leader of Conservatism. Just kidding.

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